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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#481

Post by pklausler »

Apocryphon wrote: post #470
pklausler wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the latest euphemism for "communicating with a person in some manner whose details are not relevant" to join the already well-populated set { "approach", "contact", "consult", "get in touch", "speak with" }. I hate "reach out" with a passion and draw instant conclusions about those who use it, but I'm sure that most of the above were also hated when they were invented and it does fill a need for a missing verb i…

As buzzwordy as it is, "pinging someone" sounds even worse.

"Tell" and "ask" can almost always be used to replace "reach out to".

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#482

Post by enjo »

unoti wrote: post #186
tobz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not find it strange, or at least confusing, that you're arguing a point here that is predicated on studying for an interview, rather than the actual position? "This person didn't study for the interview, so what did they expect to happen?" Oh, I don't know, maybe to be asked questions directly related to the position, amongst other things.

> Do you not find it strange, or at least confusing, that you're arguing a point here that is predicated on studying for an interview, rather than the actual position? No, I don't find it strange that I want them to prepare for something they're not going to use normally, but agree it might be confusing. For the actual positions I'm hiring for, nobody in the world outside our teams understands the systems. The candid…

I use Google Hangouts every day, whatever they're using for selecting engineers clearly isn't working.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#483

Post by devonkim »

unprepare wrote: post #141
dspillett wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* being hired because they passed a test they cheated on* The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself - it is just a way to pair down the choices of who you interview when you have many candidates. If you have knowledgeable people in the interview process (i.e. at least have a dev present for a dev interview, not just managers or HR people) then you should be able to catch those that don't really have t…

>The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself Have you had many IT interviews? I have, they are vastly non-technical interviews. Unless you count "have you ever used #CommonSoftware? how about #SlightlylessCommonSoftware?" as a technical interview. I'm an IT administrator, not a programmer, so i'm speaking to my experience in that field, I am not trying to make any claims about how programming interviews…

The discounts and kickbacks matter far less than referrals from the major tech company vendor for, say, integration work that's contracted. Most tech work outside major cities comes down to basic IT or contracting for the big tech companies that don't want to deal with enterprise drivel.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#484

Post by fencepost »

aavz wrote: post #393

I'm sorry, but breadth-first-search is a simple and fundamental algorithm and straightforward to write if you understand the concept and have decent coding skills. You're just visiting a level of the tree at a time: stick each level in a list, iterate over it, and append the next level's nodes to the next list. There's no trick to it. Not being able to do write a basic BFS algorithm suggests a) you didn't do any inte…

Simple, fundamental, and for a surprisingly large percentage of folks completely non-relevant to anything they've done in the past 5-10 years (or more).

My immediate thought is that if I have to implement a breadth-first search from scratch it probably means that I or someone has made a terrible mistake someplace.

Also, I'd want more information. Am I just getting some values then doing some recursion? How large is the maze? The stack? Are these spherical frictionless chickens or do I need to worry about real-world constraints?

Or for someone else's mention of the Nth from last item in a linked list, my first questions would be "Do I know the length?", "Is this going to need to be repeated?" and possibly "Do I have enough RAM available to create a ring buffer of N addresses?"

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#485

Post by geebee »

pklausler wrote: post #427
geebee wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's reasonable, but I'd like to share an experience I had interviewing a long time back. I'd been writing lots of mathematically intensive code for building and solving large scale linear programs for about a year, and I interviewed at a job that was doing lots of math-ish business analysis. Code would certainly be written. I was incredibly busy, and mainly spent my interview prep on math I thought would be releva…

How the question is posed really matters. What if the question had been "hey, you have a starting node in a linked structure, and you want to visit / collect / search all of the nodes that it can reach, without duplicates", you'd probably come up with DFS or BFS on the spot because the problem is not that hard and those are really the only two ways to attack it, and having found one of the two you'd probably also rea…

All that is true, but I went through some interviews last year at Google, and honestly, you really can't afford to be thinking about things like this. Nobody is going to ask you to just implement DFS, but you may get a problem that essentially reduces to DFS, if you can see it. In my experience, you really will be expected to solve this problem at a whiteboard in 45 minutes. Syntax and so forth won't be an issue, but you can't do too much handwaving, you really are expected to write code that solves the problem.

If you have to stop and reason your way back through DFS, I'd say there's no way you'll get this done in 45 minutes. You need to know this stuff cold.

Rote memorization is useless, of course, because you won't be able to adapt or modify these algorithms. But there's a kind of memorization in the level of sharpness and mental prep you need to have when you walk into those interviews.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#486

Post by marme »

I find it funny how many people dont realize the "your next interviewer is out of office so we are going to end early" is code for were have already decided to reject you so we dont want to waste any more of our employees time interviewing you. No company schedules a set number of interviews then decides to hire someone without doing every one of those interviews

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#487

Post by Cpoll »

I'll preface by saying I completely agree with the sentiment of the article.

However, I was taken aback by the author's refusal to try to solve BFS. To me, it feels like someone should be able to reinvent it relatively easy - that it's akin to a linked-list, palindrome or FizzBuzz question.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#488

Post by Morgawr »

dimino wrote: post #479
Morgawr wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming for ~8 years as well and have implemented BFS multiple times, especially in occasions where I have to travel nested data structures and want to print them in a specific order. BFS and DFS are the bread and butter of tree/graph problems and every software engineer is expected to encounter them at least once in their life. What if you want to debug a complex data structure or just a tree and want…

I guess I should rephrase. I've been programming for ~8 years and I've never been presented with a problem that insisted I know what BFS was explicitly. It is intuitive, which even further pushes the question "Why do I need to know this to be an effective programmer"?

You don't need to know BFS, you need to show that you can come up with a BFS implementation if you need to do so. You can always say "wait, remind me again, which one was BFS?" and the interviewer can certainly tell you at least what the conditions are. Maybe he might think a bit less of you (although I personally wouldn't) because BFS is a really really common name in the jargon of a programmer, but still it's better than simply blanking out and then angrily claiming that it's unfair to ask BFS.

A similar question could be "Can you print in order all the elements of a given tree/graph?", would you find that more fair compared to straight out using the word "BFS/Breadth First Search"?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#489

Post by st553 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #58

The OP is describing the new grad tech hiring process. It looks like an exam because it's for hiring people straight out of school. For experienced people, it's not what you know, it's who you know. You tell your connected friend that you're looking for a job, he tells you who's hiring and gives you a recommendation. You still have an interview, but it's no longer adversarial, it's a formality, it's friendly, it's ju…

This hasen't been my experience. I've been referred a few times before and still thrown to the whiteboard to reverse a linked list.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#490

Post by falcolas »

tomp wrote: post #337
falcolas wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really - these kinds of interviews are about hiring "People Like Us", i.e. recent college CS graduates who the interviewers like right off the bat (are they going to strongly recommend someone they don't like). It discourages diversity, reinforces ageism, and creates a stagnation in the company doing the hiring. I've seen this directly happen - the interviewers were two Asian and one White male, who came to this…

> Looking over the engineering department, I saw, with one exception in fourty, young White or Asian males. IME, that's much more a consequence of the limited diversity of candidates, not a limited diversity of hires. In most places I've worked at, even if they hired all women and blacks (or other non-Asian minorities), there would still be at most approximately 5% women and 0% blacks (the latter would probably be hi…

How many of those potential candidates were weeded out by phone interviews with the same hiring criteria and scoring mechanism?

I have personally been rejected after a phone interview, not because my technical skills were lacking, but because the interviewer didn't like something he heard in our conversation. I could quite literally hear him checking out of the conversation and going back to surfing the internet.

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